Patients who used an interactive computer program about depression while waiting to see their primary-care doctor were nearly twice as likely to ask about the condition and significantly more likely to receive a recommendation ...

New software that estimates the likelihood that someone has cancer based on their symptoms could help GPs decide which patients to send for further tests, according to a study announced at the National Cancer Research Institute ...

Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of situations we've never encountered before—a familiar person in an unfamiliar place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role—but the ...

The older we get, the greater our risk of developing osteoporosis becomes. The fragile bone disease affects about 9 million Americans, and experts from the National Osteoporosis Foundation predict that it will be responsible ...

A new computer program can automatically extract the vocals from a random collection of mp3 music files and classify each track depending on whether the singer is male or female, a trained singer, a semi-professional or an ...

A tumor is not a uniform mass of identical cells. However, teasing apart genetic heterogeneity within a biopsied tumor can be difficult. Researchers often fail to tell the difference between a rare variant ...

Predicting the winner of a sporting event with accuracy close to that of a statistical computer program could be possible with proper training, according to researchers. In a study published today, experiment ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have developed a new tool to help surgeons use X-rays to track devices used in "minimally invasive" ...

(HealthDay)—Talk about mind reading. Researchers have discovered a potential way to decode your dreams, predicting the content of the visual imagery you've experienced on the basis of neural activity recorded ...

Accumulating evidence suggests that certain brain areas involved in processing physical pain may also underlie feelings of social pain. But can altering brain activity in these areas actually change how people experience ...

Many patients who have genetic testing for Lynch syndrome, a hereditary predisposition to colon cancer, receive the inconclusive result "variants of uncertain clinical significance." This can be a problem, as people with ...

Computer program

Computer programs (also software programs, or just programs) are instructions for a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its human-readable source code form, from which executable programs are derived (e.g., compiled), enables a programmer to study and develop the algorithm.

Computer source code is often written by professional computer programmers. Source code is written in a programming language that usually follows one of two main paradigms: imperative or declarative programming. Source code may be converted into an executable file (sometimes called an executable program or a binary) by a compiler. Alternatively, computer programs may be executed by a central processing unit with the aid of an interpreter, or may be embedded directly into hardware (in which case it is more widely known under the term 'firmware', as something 'between' software and hardware).

Computer programs may be categorized along functional lines: system software and application software. And many computer programs may run simultaneously on a single computer, a process known as multitasking.